Protagonist-Surus

Surus is a full-stack financial infrastructure platform for digital asset builders, offering qualified custody, reserve management, and token issuance. The platform acquires, custodies, and manages the underlying assets that back a customer's stablecoin or token, with assets held by a regulated state trust company. Surus wholly owns Surus Trust Company, a North Carolina-chartered trust company that provides fiduciary services, fund administration, and bankruptcy-remote asset segregation.

The service stack includes qualified custody accounts, multiple trust structures, MPC wallet infrastructure, configurable reserve portfolios (Treasuries, government securities, money market funds, HQLAs, bonds, public and private securities, and other real-world assets, some of which may require separate regulatory approval), built-in KYC/AML compliance, and fund and vault administration. Onboarding is described as a three-step process: designing the infrastructure stack, launching a token or stablecoin on a customer-selected chain with real-time reporting via a dashboard, and scaling reserve and custody infrastructure as assets under management grow from roughly $1M to $1B. Surus states it has no AUM minimums or lock-ups and is chain-agnostic. The company also publishes an interview/podcast series covering topics such as tokenized real-world asset liquidity and decentralized lending.

Business model

Surus sells regulated custody and issuance infrastructure as a service, with its own wholly owned North Carolina-chartered trust company holding client assets and providing fiduciary services, fund administration, and bankruptcy-remote segregation [0].

Usage-based custody fees charged on assets under management, presented via an on-site calculator (for example, an effective rate of 9.47 bps and a monthly cost of $789 at $10M AUM), with separate fees for tokenization services and no AUM minimums or lock-ups [0].